Secrets in Time and Space
by CharlotteBlackwood
Summary: What if your family secret was a bit... nonlinear? What if your grandmother was a bit... timey-wimey? What if the Doctor shows up at your door thinking you're her? Uncover the Lynn family secrets with Averie and her flatmate David. Prequel to come. 12th/13th Doctor. 11th listed until list updated. M


**A/N: This is my first Doctor Who fan fiction, but I hope it lives up to expectations. This is post-Clara, so that anything that happens in season seven and eight (ish?) is not contradicted, to the best of my ability. I'll work bits of it in as we find out what's happened. I'm picturing him as a thirteenth Doctor, played by Chris Rankin, but I'll try to keep him open for being Peter Capaldi as well, just so those who grow attached to 12 can picture him as 12.**

** -C**

"Dad, David's been fine," Averie argued on the phone with her father. "I just need you to fix the toaster before he explodes the place, but otherwise he's a great flatmate."

Averie Lynn, aged twenty-two, had just gotten her first flat, with the help of her cousin in finding a flatmate. And her father was no pleased.

Averie's cousin on her mother's side, Amber Murray, had been seeing a guy named William, who happened to be best friends with David McCall, who also had needed a flatmate. David was about thirty, worked in the building next to the one Averie worked in, and his last flatmate had just gotten a job in Scotland, so he was desperate.

"It's perfect," Amber had insisted.

And Averie had to agree. Things were working out quite well. They kept virtually the same hours. They hated all the same foods. They even were both terrified of eggplant.

But Averie had a tendency for breaking things, and David had this manly-urge sort of need to fix them, and he also happened to be absolutely terrible at fixing things. So she called her father.

"I'll come by in the morning," her father finally sighed. "But Averie, don't let him touch it. Hide it if you have to. Understood?"

"Fine, Dad," Averie sighed. "Love you."

"Love you too, darling, good bye."

Averie pulled her long, auburn hair into a ponytail, wondering what she was going to do with the rest of her afternoon off. Her boss, Paul Cook, had gone home sick and given her half a day off with pay just to keep things going at a rate he could control. The contract they were working on was so important to him that he didn't want to miss a minute of it.

There was a buzzing and she sighed, moving to the intercom.

"Valerie!" the voice said. "Valerie, it's me! Let me in, it's very important! People's lives are at stake!"

She'd been just about to tell the bloke to bugger off or she'd call the police, but at that last bit she gripped her phone, still ready to call the police, but she buzzed him up, opening the door when she heard frantic knocking.

A man stood there, a man she didn't recognize, but who seemed to recognize her.

"Valerie, I've been looking for you for ages, where have you been?" he demanded sternly, and she just stared at him.

"I'm not Valerie," she said in confusion.

"That's rubbish," he spluttered, confused. "You look like Valerie. You talk like Valerie, the Tardis says you're practically Valerie - whatever that means - although you don't dress like Valerie, that's for certain." He glared at her suspiciously. "Who are you and why are you pretending to be Valerie?"

"I'm not pretending to be anyone!" Averie said, disgusted. "My name's Averie Lynn, and my grandmother's name was Valerie, but she's been dead for over twenty years, so why you're looking for her, I don't know-"

"Maiden name?" he snapped.

"What?" Averie asked, confused.

"What was your grandmother's maiden name, Averie?" he asked. "This is very important."

Averie couldn't remember what her grandmother's maiden name was, although her father had told her, she was sure. She knew her mother's maiden name was Murray, as that was what went on all the forms.

"I don't remember," she admitted. "Hang on, just let me check, I have her obituary in a scrapbook. Just, calm down."

Forgetting about the statement he'd made about people's lives being at stake she was suddenly very worried about her own as she searched through the old scrapbook.

"Valerie Brownstone," she finally said in a shaky voice. "Valerie Brownstone Lynn."

"That explains why you were nearly Valerie, then," he sighed. "I was beginning to wonder if the Tardis had lost her marbles. You're her granddaughter."

"And who are you?" Averie demanded, suddenly reassured that he wasn't going to hurt her. "Why are you looking for my grandmother?"

"People could die and I needed her help, but for some reason I can't seem to find her."

"She's dead," Averie reminded.

"Yes, well, never mind that," the man snapped. "I'm the Doctor."

Averie dropped her phone, recalling something her father had told her years ago, when she was about sixteen and got her first phone.

_If a man calling himself the Doctor ever asks you for Grandma Lynn, call me, Averie, do you understand? Call me right away_.

"Have a seat in there," Averie said, pointing to the kitchen. "I've got to make a phone call."

"Who?" he asked. "Why?"

"My father," she sighed. "I just thought it was one of his stupid eccentricities. I never thought anyone was ever going to ask for my grandmother decades after her death. And then you come along."

The Doctor - or whoever he was - went into the kitchen as directed and she dialed her father again.

"Dad? Hi, I know I just called, but you remember what you told me about calling you if someone called the Doctor came asking about Grandma? He's sitting in my kitchen." She turned and saw the Doctor looking at the toaster with curiosity, running some electric thing next to it. She put her hand over the receiver and hissed, "Please don't touch that." She turned her back, talking to her father again. "David's going to be here any minute, so I feel perfectly safe, but if you're going to come here... He said something a bit odd when he arrived. I wish you'd hurry."

Averie's father assured her he would be there as soon as possible and she heard the front door open, relieved when David came through.

"Who's that?" the Doctor asked, pointing at David.

"This is my flatmate, David McCall," Averie said. "David, this is the Doctor."

David raised his eyebrows, flicking his long ginger hair out of his eyes.

"Doctor?" he asked. "Doctor who?"

"My father's coming over about him, and the toaster, so don't touch it," Averie snapped at him, gesturing for them to sit down.

"What, that?" the Doctor asked, pointing at the toaster. "I fixed it."

"Seriously?" David asked, moving over to the toaster and pushing the lever on the side and watching that the toaster actually stayed down for the proper amount of time, heating and everything, before the lever popped back up. "Wow. What did you do to it?"

"I've got a screwdriver," the Doctor said with a grin. "It's sonic. It's got a setting for that."

Averie raised her eyebrows.

Sonic screwdriver? What sort of nutter was she dealing with?

"So, you said your grandmother died over twenty years ago," the Doctor said, turning to Averie. "What happened?"

"Weak heart, I guess," Averie said with a shrug. "My mum went into labor with me up in Birmingham, and she was down in Cardiff, and when my dad called his dad to tell them I was about to be born she must have gotten over-excited, because she died. Heart failure."

The Doctor nodded, frowning.

"It's odd, because that would have been, what, ninety-one, ninety-two? But I was sure I'd left her in about 2005 or so..."

Averie blinked at him, confused.

What on earth was he talking about?

She turned to look at David, who was looking at her like he was afraid he might be going mad.

There was a buzz and David hurried up to get the door, letting Kevin Lynn in after him, with that same nervous look he always had when he came face to face with Averie's father.

"Doctor?" Kevin asked, looking at the man who said he was the Doctor and frowning. "You don't look anything like she said you would."

"You must be Averie's father," the Doctor said. "Maybe you can help us clear this up before people die."

Kevin raised his eyebrows at his daughter, who merely shrugged and said weakly, "He fixed the toaster."

Shaking his head he sat down between his daughter and the Doctor, pulling out of his coat pocket a journal his mother had left and opening it to the first page. He cleared his throat and began reading it aloud.

"This journal is for the Doctor, should he ever come across me or whoever I hand it off to. If he is looking for me, I'm sorry that he won't be able to find me. Jack said the Weeping Angels would keep him from following me. Well, Jack said that the Weeping Angels would divert my time stream where not even the Tardis could follow, but that's beside the point.

"I was working with Torchwood again, trying to sort out my life without the Doctor, when we came across the Angels. I hope the team was able to deal with them, but I found myself unable to stop from blinking when Jack needed me, and I awoke in Cardiff many years earlier. Jeffrey Lynn was the first person I met, and I easily convinced him that I'd been discharged from the hospital with amnesia. He took me in, trying to help me, and when I realized I was pregnant he agreed to marry me and claim the child was his."

Averie frowned.

"Wait," she interrupted, "do you mean that Grandpa Lynn isn't my grandfather? Then who is?"

"She didn't know," Kevin replied with a sigh. He closed the journal and set it down, handing it to the Doctor. "She writes about that, said it could be someone named Owen, or someone named Jack. She never elaborated on anything, maybe assuming you'd understand. The things she wrote, space and time, all the fantastic things... It really happened?"

"Of course it really happened," the Doctor snapped. "I need to borrow your phone."

Jumping with surprise, Averie handed over her cell phone, watching him do the same thing with his little... screwdriver? She shook her head, confused about the device but feeling it wasn't the right time to ask questions.

He held the phone up and waited for a moment.

"Hello, Jack? It's the Doctor. Can you trace this call? Good, because I have no idea where I am, but I need you here. The name on the door is either McCall or Lynn when you're buzzing up."

"It's Lynn," David said.

"Lynn, it's Lynn," the Doctor said quickly. "You've got it? Great, get here quickly and come alone."

He hung up the phone and handed it back to Averie, then getting up and pacing.

"If the Weeping Angels got to her, that explains why I couldn't find her and when she was dying before I'd left her," he muttered. "The first time."

Averie raised her eyebrows.

"I'm honestly not sure Jack can have children, but as Owen, if I recall from what Jack told me last time I met him, is dead, it's the only lead I've got."

Averie cleared her throat and said, "Excuse me, but you really still haven't explained who you are."

He raised his thick eyebrows at me and said, "Averie Lynn, I am the Doctor. I am a madman with a box, and I travel time and space. The predators of the universe fears me, I am the protector of earth, and I just fixed your toaster. Is that good enough for you?"

With a glance over at the toaster, Averie gave another shrug and looked over at David, who shrugged back.

Whatever all of that meant, she had a notion that she was going to be finding out soon.

"Now, any minute now," he muttered about ten minutes later.

And the buzzer went off.

"Well, somebody let him in!" the Doctor cried, and David scrambled to his feet to let in a man who looked to be in his thirties or forties, but sort of plastic, like he was that way artificially. He stared at Averie the moment he walked in and said, "Valerie?"

"Not Valerie, her granddaughter," the Doctor said dismissively. "You three, stand in the row."

There wasn't really a question of which three, and he arranged them so that Kevin was standing between his daughter and the stranger as the screwdriver-thing was run across them in a line, back and forth, the Doctor frowning.

"Well, that settles it," he snapped. "Jack, congratulations, you're a grandfather."

"What?" Jack cried. "What are you talking about, Doctor?"

"This man here," the Doctor replied, pointing at Kevin, "is the son you and Valerie had. You didn't know you had him because she was very newly pregnant when she was sent back by the Angels. This, this is his daughter, Averie. She's your granddaughter."

Jack turned to Averie and looked at her like she was alien.

"You look just like her," he whispered, frowning. "Even the hair. How...?"

"My mother had red hair," Averie said softly, glancing over at her father, whose hair was a lighter shade of brown's than Jack.

But her grandfather - Dyfed Lynn - had been blond.

"Alicia died in childbirth," Kevin said softly. "It's been just me and Averie since day one. I named her after my mother, sort of. Switched the letters around, took out the 'l'. Mum would have hated me actually naming her Valerie."

"You're my... son?" Jack said, tears in his eyes. "Was she happy? Was she...?"

"Valerie Brownstone lived a very happy life. Not a very long one, mind," Kevin explained. "She died when she was forty-seven. She was... my age. I was only twenty-five, and it was the very day Averie here was born."

"Born in 1944," Jack muttered, doing quick math in his head. "She would have been born in 1944."

"She wasn't, Jack," the Doctor said quietly. "You know that."

"When was she born, then?" Averie asked, still confused.

"1983," chorused Jack, Kevin, and the Doctor.

Averie and David exchanged confused looks.

"But that's not possible," David argued. "That would mean she was born years after Mr. Lynn was born. That would mean that she was eight years old when she died. But you just said she was forty-seven."

"Time's non-linear, David, and there's all sorts of timey-wimey stuff going on-"

"Timey-wimey?" Jack asked, snorting. "Technical term?"

"Yes," the Doctor said defensively. "I started it. It's a thing. Timey-wimey."

"Basically," Jack said, realizing that the Doctor was not helping anyone understand the peculiar case of Valerie Brownstone, "Valerie was seventeen when she met the Doctor, she travelled with him for two years, he left her in 2005 for about a year, picked her up again, and for the next two years of her linear life she was with him and with Torchwood off and on. It was 2008when she was sent back in time by the Weeping Angels to live out her life in another time, so probably the sixties."

"1965," Kevin said, clearing his throat. "I was born in March, 1966."

David shook his head, falling into a seat.

"Nutters, the lot," he muttered, and Averie smacked him hard on the back of the head.

"Okay, I think we've wasted plenty of time trying to figure this out, when it's obviously beyond my comprehension," Averie said politely. "What were you saying about lives at stake?"

"Right, I need all of you to follow me," the Doctor said abruptly, grinning. "Everybody out, across the street, and follow Jack into the big blue box. Jack," he said, tossing a key to Jack, who held it up to indicate he caught it and led the way down the steps. "That's a loan, Jack, not a gift!"

"He always says that," Jack joked as they went down the street, across the street, and over to a large blue box that said, "Police Box."

Averie looked up at the strange contraption she'd only seen in history books and stepped inside.

She blinked, glanced around the strange metal room she found herself in, and she turned to Jack, who was standing at the center with the big strange column surrounded by what looked like a control panel, grinning.

"Is it a bit...?"

"Bigger on the inside?" Jack asked. "Yeah. It's a Tardis, it's Time Lord technology. But more importantly, the blue box is just a cloaking device."

"Right," Averie muttered, turning around and taking it all in. "Makes some sense."

"None of this makes any sense," David muttered. "I just wanted a flatmate. A nice normal flatmate with a linear timeline."

"Her timeline is actually perfectly linear," the Doctor said as he came in and closed the doors, moving straight for the controls and messing with buttons and levers. "But now neither of your timelines are linear," he said with a grin, flipping a lever. David opened his mouth to ask what the Doctor meant when the whole place began to shake and a strange noise Averie had never heard before was going.

"What did you just do?" she shrieked.

"We're travelling back in time!" Jack laughed. "Where are we going?"

"Not important, important thing is that people will die if you not follow my instructions exactly, yes?"

He looked around at all of them, seeing Jack nod first, then Kevin. Averie looked terrified, but then she nodded, knowing that if her father agreed it was the right thing to do. She didn't know anything about this Doctor, and he seemed to be talking nonsense, but if her father trusted him then she would trust him, too.

"David?" the Doctor asked. "I know you're in this without really wanting to be, or really understanding, but I'm asking you to trust me because your life may depend upon it."

David looked around at them all, then back at the Doctor, and with confusion in his eyes he turned and looked at Averie, who nodded slowly.

"Right," he finally said. "I promise."

And then they landed.


End file.
